Utility Week

Utility of the Future: climate change UTILITY WEEK | 20TH - 26TH SEPTEMBER 2019 | 13 Target practice: First Light charts a different path to fusion In recent years there has been a surge in private enterprises looking to realise the promise of fusion power. The Fusion Industry Association, founded in 2018, is symbolic of the legitimisation of the fledgling industry. Of the FIA's 19 members, 12 have been formed since 2009. While government projects have tended to operate over very long time scales, a number of investors are seeing fusion research as a viable private invest- ment option that could deliver over the shorter term. First Light Fusion is one such start-up, based in Kidlington, Oxfordshire. It has been pioneer- ing an alternative fusion method known as inertial con„ nement, rather than the magnetic con„ ne- ment used by the industry-stand- ard tokamaks design (see box, Tokamaks, p14). Gianluca Pisanello, the compa- ny's chief operating o‰ cer, thinks small start-ups are an attractive proposition because they can have some advantages over big, national eŠ orts. "The biggest one is de„ nitely agility and the possi- bility to do things much quicker," he says. He also believes they can come to decisions faster and use their budgets, while smaller, more e‰ ciently. Furthermore, Pisanello believes First Light's approach to fusion suits the size of the com- pany. He explains that the com- pany does have "a big machine", but the idea is to constantly update it rather than starting from scratch and making each iteration a new big machine. First Light's approach hinges on a phenomenon called cavity collapse, which was the focus of founder and chief executive Nicholas Hawker's PhD thesis. When vapour-„ lled bubbles of relatively low pressure are created within a liquid, they violently col- lapse under the higher pressure of the surrounding medium. During this collapse, the bubble is forced down into a fraction of its original size, which creates extremely high temperatures and pressure within; theoretically enough heat and pressure to initiate fusion. The set-up First Light employs to create these conditions involves a projectile and a target. The projectile, a metal coin, is electro- magnetically blasted at 20km/s towards the target, a plastic pod, that contains a suspended bubble of tritium and deuterium. The projectile collides with the target, which causes a shockwave. This compresses the gas bubble inside to a minute volume, causing the high pressure and temperature needed to fuse the isotopes together. First Light's approach has sev- eral advantages over traditional paths to fusion, such as reduced eŠ ects from the neutron flux, because the complex technol- ogy of the launching mechanism is distanced from the reaction. Similarly, this leaves plenty of room to encapsulate the reaction with lithium, maximising returns on tritium production. A further e‰ ciency bonus is the fact that inertial con„ nement does not require any costly magnets to stabilise plasma. First Light likens the diŠ erence between its approach and the approach of other organisations as the diŠ erence between a furnace and a combustion engine. The furnace burns steadily and slowly through its stream of fuel, while the engine quickly combusts all of its fuel, which is then replaced and the process is repeated. In operation since 2011, First Light has so far received £25 million in funding, £23 million of which came in 2014 as funds raised to reach its goal of com- pleting the reaction. First Light „ nished construction on Machine 3 in February, the device they expect to achieve fusion by the end of the year. While there is no set date in 2019 when First Light will prove that it can accomplish fusion via its methods, Pisanello is con„ dent. He says it's "like everything in sci- ence, you can't really stick a date on it", but "we have very good reasons to expect that we will be able to stick to what we prom- ised". He adds that, as far as he is aware, First Light is the only fusion start-up "that has always stuck to the timelines". Once it has demonstrated fusion, First Light aims to dem- onstrate energy gain by 2024, a whole year before ITER even has plasma. Pisanello expects that an inertial con„ nement power station will have a reactor that „ res „ ve times a second. To reach this stage, First Light will have to initi- ate another funding round. There is no „ gure on how much money will be needed to build a machine that demonstrates energy gain, only that it will be "substantially more" than the previous sums. Part of this „ ve- year project will be dedicated to producing detailed designs on a power plant based on the company's technology. First Light's future business plan – once they have produced fusion reactors – includes manufacturing and supplying the targets. The precise materials and designs of the targets are a commercial secret, one that is vital to the operation of the reactor as a whole. Pisanello explains that "the target is really where our technol- ogy lies" because the design multiplies the velocity of the shockwave. If this was not the case, the projectile would have to be „ red at "unrealistic velocities" to achieve fusion. Currently, First Light has an experimental target design, which he says multiplies the impact velocity by 10.2, compared with the multiplication of 1.5 given by a simple cube shape. With the sale of the targets so integral to the business, Pisanello has no fears that they could be emulated by other companies. He explains that the target is complex not only in design but in the manufacturing processes involved, so if you were trying to reverse engineer one, you would still need all the necessary infra- structure, and "you don't know why it works, you don't know how it works". UTILITY WEEK CONGRESS 2019 8-9 October 2019 | Birmingham 'Building and maintaining resilience' will be one of the key themes of Utility Week's two-day Congress in October. For further information or to book your ticket, visit: uw-event.co.uk/congress First Light hope Machine 3 will prove the concept by the end of this year "Start-ups have agility and the possibility to do things much quicker." GIANLUCA PISANELLO, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, FIRST LIGHT

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